Year 2, Day 113: Well, I forgot today was Monday 16 times even though I put in about 6 hours of work today. Holiday weekends always throw me for a loop. We had a conference call lunch with family for funsies so that was one bit of relaxing we did, and then we also took everyone for a looooong walk later in the afternoon. I needed to try to walk off some back aches and that didn’t quite work as planned but it was still good to stretch my legs. I did not get out for a walk more than twice last week. That’s pretty bad and it was even more obvious by how much I huffed and puffed my way back up the hill.
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Some days I am starting to see a tiny bit of the more normal parent me peek out. Sometimes I have patience again, kind of like before the pandemic. Not a lot, and not for long but I thought that part of me had died, crawled out of the grave, gotten bludgeoned, and died again.
Year 2, Day 114: For once, my decision to go to bed instead of working late the night before worked out. Usually I lay there futilely trying to fall asleep, get frustrated, and then feel like it was all a wasted effort by 2 or 3 am.
This time, I still didn’t fall asleep when I wanted to but I did get enough rest that after Smol Acrobat started their 6 am round of thumping, babbling, and hawk cries, I was just about able to get up and prep their bottle. PiC changed and fed them while I took care of my toilette, and then he passed out with the baby happily remonstrating next to his prone body. Smol and I hung out for the next hour and a half, playing, walking the dog, eating again, me trying to work a little bit in two minute spurts.
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I’m covering for people on the team being out again this week, this is the fourth or fifth time in five weeks, because everyone’s doing some kind of travel now that CA is opened up again. I’m DROWNING in work and my brain can hardly keep up. Well, it will. But I hate this feeling of being behind on everything.
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We made a rookie mistake and miscalculated both how long it would take us to run two errands and underestimated how much formula to bring with us for those errands for Smol. So underfed and tired Smol was very unhappy. We skipped their last nap and put them straight to bed after feeding but it was still too little too late, they were up multiple times in the night just miserable. Sigh.
Year 2, Day 115: My body’s all out of whack this week for other reasons but that lack of sleep really loosens up my joints. This is not great. On top of a doubled workload, I also need to schedule two sets of activities and lessons for JB for the rest of the month so at some point. One teacher won’t be available for weekly lessons anymore and the other one isn’t teaching anymore so I have to pick a replacement. I’ve got to find the time for that. Thank goodness PiC is on lunch prep today.
My pain was so high by the end of the day, between sleep-deprivation fatigue, stress multiplying my aches, and overdoing the walk in the afternoon that when I got up from bed, having forgotten my bedside water, I could only hobble. Hello, geriatric me.
Year 2, Day 116: We were supposed to do pizza night last night! We forgot. My brain is maxed out. All I could think this morning was I hate work, I want to retire.
I ran a load of laundry last night, the dishwasher this morning, and the robot vacuum this afternoon. Thank goodness for robot helpers! JB suffered a great disappointment when an Auntie had to cancel their call this afternoon, they instead spent their afternoon doing a consolation puzzle (100-200 piece puzzles are too easy for them now, we need to level up. What’s next, 300?), reading, racing on NitroType, and watching the Hello Kitty and Friends Adventure shorts that I had picked out for their viewing. I really shouldn’t share so much Hello Kitty stuff with JB. Passing along my personal obsession to the next generation is Not Good for our pocketbooks. (But it’s so CUTE.)
Year 2, Day 117: Thinking of my CPA and how she still owes me a few amendments that would result in refunds and how I can’t pay her until she tells me how much I owe. I’d like to pay her. I already sent a reminder saying I’d like to pay her, please tell me how much but she just said she would get back to me. Still waiting….
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Smol woke up, and laid back down to nap several times over the course of an hour. I can’t tell if I should count that as awake time or asleep time for the purpose of calculating their next nap time!
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We’re starting to see school related information and it’s giving me whiplash. The CDC says vaccinated teachers and students don’t need to mask. I want to know why this country thinks I’ll believe anyone who is maskless without solid proof of vaccination given the behaviors we’ve seen to date. The tantrums, the lying, the people who spoiled vaccines, the person who was caught selling blank vaccine cards. And even if I wasn’t completely mistrustful of the general public, kids under 12 still can’t be vaccinated so are we going to only expect them to mask? Personally, though we’re both vaccinated, PiC and I stay masked to keep JB company. They have been really good about it but I know it helps with their compliance to have us masked. Our friends with under-12 do the same.
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We’ve been having medium range planning conversations about the next car. We need to decide 1. what we need 2. when we need it and 3. when what we need will be available. Ideally this purchase will be somewhere 2-5 years down the line, if we can push it out that far, because I want to save for this incrementally over a long time. Also because we aren’t convinced the technology is mature enough for what we’re looking for. We don’t want to get into a new tech money and time pit.
He’s done some initial research and for the size of hybrid vehicle we need for four humans plus an additional guest at times, a large dog, and luggage, we’re looking at $30-50k. That’s a staggering sum. The high end is almost laughable and it’s really truly unlikely we’d ever be willing to make that happen. That’s huge. HUGE. It’s far too large a proportion of our income.
Heck, the low end of the range is the total cost of what I’ve paid for the two cars I’ve purchased for myself in the past twenty years: one new and one used. I know that’s a meaningless stat but it’s still true. My first car served me well until I had to let my dad keep it ten years ago. I eventually gave it up permanently in the Going No Contact process. My second car is over 15 years old and I fully expected to hit 20 years in it. I’m not sure if it’ll be my car or the dog car that gets replaced but they’re both quite old and the maintenance costs are real.
:: How old are your vehicles? Do you have timelines for replacing them?
Year 2, Day 106: An unexpected boon of Smol’s early morning wakings is that if I can get up too, PiC and I have time to talk for a few minutes like adult humans with interests in the world and live together. This morning we talked about the photos of our dear recently deceased friend that I found over the weekend while doing data backup. We couldn’t decide at first the best way to share with their widow but landed on making a photo book. So that’ll be my thing this and next week.
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I read The Pout-Pout Fish (Bookshop, Amazon) to Smol. They’re not quite old enough to appreciate it yet but it nailed my feelings today. I feel sick (Blub), achy (Bluuuub), and tired. . . (Bluuuuuuuuub).
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PiC cooked all weekend and I’m so grateful to him.
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Smol slept through the night most nights last week but come Friday, that went out the window. They just had this burst of development and they had to wake up the first night because HANGRY! The second night because … I’m not sure why but just needed to be held and sung to for a few minutes. The third night was to babble and raspberry to themselves a few times. Weird, but funny!
One less funny side effect of the development is their mood swings. So many swings. Happy sad happy sad.
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There’s a chance we might have daycare in October so I inputted the cost into my spreadsheet for the last three months of the year. O_O This upended my delicately balanced cashflow and budget. Daycare is so expensive, even part-time. I don’t want to reduce our savings but we’re going to have to. Better to know now. At least I already funded our brokerage for our planned weekly investments for the next quarter. We’d sold some investments to shift our allocation so that helps soothe my nerves. (more…)
Year 2, Day 99: Smol slept through the night! But chose to end the night at 5 am. Win some, lose some. I didn’t get to sleep until midnight because of my leg pain, PiC didn’t get to sleep until 2 am because of work, so we were both in rough shape. But they had a good first nap, which freed us to get work done and feed everyone breakfast and settle into a bit of a rhythm for the rest of the morning.
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Sera’s got a dry hacking cough that started last week. It was only once a day before and sounded like she was just trying to clear her throat but today it’s acting up more frequently so we’ll need to get to the vet. I wasn’t ready to go back yet. The last time we were there tore my heart to pieces. I’m not ready.
The vet’s booking routine appointments well into July, their first available is in ten days. That’s not great but I’ll take it.
This keeps turning my mind to my second dog. He developed a heart murmur which turned into congestive heart failure and it was awful. I’m hoping so much that this won’t be anything close to that.
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JB woke up very late and was a rumpled mess in mind and body. They brushed their hair and their teeth but boy was their mood terrible. We clashed a few times. We managed to pull it out of the dumpster once in the morning, and then by mid afternoon, they were wound up again over losing one of their little art kit doodads. There’s only so many crises I can manage and work on a Monday.
Year 2, Day 100: Is today Tuesday? Friday? Wednesday? Monday? I don’t know. This is how most days start: What day is it? Weekday or weekend?
We’ve had to have the “don’t catch things with blades when they fall” talk. After they tried to catch a five-bladed razor when it was knocked off a shelf. š¤¦š»āāļø We then had a talk about bandaging technique and clotting.
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Why do parents say “I’m not going to say this again” when we absolutely will be saying it again?
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JB had a big fuss-fit over being told to write up their notes after a Spanish lesson. I was frustrated that after a lot of lessons, they still haven’t retained hardly anything. They were angry about having to copy down notes from the class notes to practice later.
After a cooldown period we sat down and talked. They complained that they didn’t WANT to have to write the words and they didn’t WANT to have to practice and they HATE writing.
I didn’t argue about whether they do or don’t hate writing. I don’t think they do but that’s beside the point. Instead, we had a long talk about how learning something new is always at least a little frustrating and it’s always going to require some struggle and being challenged and that for important things, we don’t give up on it because it’s important and still worth doing. I reminded them that writing was hard, learning to read took years, learning to ride a bike was frustrating but all of those things have resulted in their having so much fun getting to pick up new stories, getting to send mail to people, getting to ride bikes with their friends when we don’t get to do much else.
At first they were resistant because they wanted to fuss about how they HATE writing unless it’s getting to do her own thing but they really love riding bikes with friends and that they’re allowed to independently create correspondence that people like receiving so that turned it around.
I didn’t say it wasn’t hard to learn, just that it’s worth doing even though it can be hard. And there are things in life we will pick and choose to do. We don’t have to do everything. But the important things, even for adults, we have to stick with.
I shared that I have to learn hard things at work that I don’t like, too! It’s not easy and it’s not fun but sometimes, some things, you just gotta do. Even if you can’t see the payoff right now, there is often something pretty cool as a result of that effort later. An old friend and former teacher invited us to spend time at his house in Mexico. They can go make friends in Mexico if they learn Spanish! (This is where knowing your audience is key. That proposal for me would have fallen flat.) They perked up a little: I haven’t gotten to make new friends in a long time!
Exactly! How cool would that be to sing songs with a new friend in Spanish?
So we gotta try. Not for everything, for the important stuff, but we have to find a way. It doesn’t mean we keep doing the exact same thing, we’ll talk to the teacher and see if we can change our approach a little, but we’re not going to quit and we ARE going to try and practice.
I told them that I didn’t get to learn how to ride a bike so I don’t get to have that fun! They offered to teach me so I took the opportunity to point out that if they were teaching me, how would they feel if I flopped over and said no, I don’t want to try, I don’t like practicing, I don’t WANT to?
They seem to see that would be frustrating for a teacher and that we should practice respecting each other’s time by putting in effort and practicing.
Language
The last letter game. JB’s friend taught them a game where you pick a word and the next person has to pick a word that starts with the last letter of your word. So: hawk. Knight. Timpani. Italian. Noble. Elephant.
JB and PiC play it constantly and I’ve noticed an awful lot of common words end in n, e and t so when I play, I work really hard to find words that end in more interesting letters.
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They hear a fair bit of (light) cursing type language out in the wild, whether on TV or passing by other people talking or what have you. I’ve taken the stance that curse words aren’t “bad words,” they’re adult words that children aren’t allowed to say because they’re not mature enough to use them with discretion. Slurs are definitely bad words, though.
Responsibility
We’re incentivizing taking the initiative for doing chores and doing chores without whining again. There’s been some backsliding and I don’t want to hear it. But also I’m frustrated that we can’t seem to get one method to stick because we keep forgetting to reinforce it. That tells me the system doesn’t fit our lifestyle and we need to simplify or modify until it does but who exactly has spare brain cells for this?
Year 2, Day 92: Some mornings, you have your shit together. Some mornings, you don’t even notice that you and the kids are still in your pajamas when lessons start. Guesses which today was? I can’t even entirely blame the pandemic or the kids. Pre-kids, PiC DEFINITELY had to yell “PANTS!” at me more than once when I started to wander out of the house without actual pants on.
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People are traveling again for the summer, including my teams, which means that I’ve got a massive workload with very little time to manage it. It’s got me wistfully wishing for retirement money now because I really don’t want to go to work today, tomorrow, or the next day. Maybe this is burnout talking. Maybe I just need to schedule some of my own time off even though we aren’t traveling. I don’t yet because I’m worried that it’ll make it even harder to go back.
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Mondays stink in the normal course of things but they are worse now that PiC’s Mondays and Tuesdays are so jam-packed. I’ve started taking over the bulk of childcare on Mondays so he can deal with his particularly difficult Tuesdays. Making that an expected part of my Mondays actually eases my stress factor a bit but boy it sure it still tiring.
Of course it being a terrible nap day made things extra hard on all of us.
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We spent $80 at Sprouts on the weekend to get a lot of produce and fish. I got way too much sockeye salmon (almost 2 lbs) and that’ll probably make three dinners for us.
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I had such brain fog today that I had to choose to run an errand mid-afternoon to try and clear it. It did work, thankfully. It’s such a hard thing when every single decision is so zero-sum. 20 or 30 minutes to clear my head has such a tangible impact on what I can get done, but at the same time, the less obvious impact where I can regain some breathing space and my patience also has an impact on my workday and my day.
Year 2, Day 93: Oh my aching knees. I’ve been playing and sitting on the ground with Smol too much. My knees are both swollen and hyperextending today. What a combination. I was on the overnight last night. They were squirming around 130 am but settled back on their own, and howling at 330 am and needed a feed. We’re working on weaning off night feeds to try and get uninterrupted sleep overnight and are down from 4 ounces to 2 ounces per night waking. It’s not that they’re always up for prolonged painful periods, it’s that the wake ups are always disruptive and we aren’t getting enough consecutive hours strung together. My fingers are crossed that we can get to 10-12 consecutive hours overnight without needing parental intervention.
My circles are starting to dip their toes back into circulating more. We had a masked playdate with friends we haven’t seen in person for more than a year. One friend got a haircut. Another one will schedule one soon. Yet others traveled for vacation recently.
I wonder when we’ll be out of pandemic times here. I’ve gotten in the habit of these weekly logs, I wonder when I’ll close these out.
I see there’s cause for concern about the Delta variants and I wonder how that’ll affect us here with family who are vaccine hesitant. It doesn’t feel like this is over yet but it also feels like many are putting a cap on it like it is. Our kids are still unprotected so we remain in a strange limbo. (more…)
Year 2, Day 64: I had an imperfect weekend. I didn’t check off half the things I needed done, I didn’t get nearly enough rest or food or water. But we did get five and a half major things done, we did get Smol to have three really decent naps across two days, we each did get some sleep on alternating nights. Not bad. So when Monday came back around the corner bearing the expectations of work again, I was zero percent excited.
It’s not you, Monday, it’s me and work. I’m not in love anymore.
What would I do if I didn’t need to work today? I’d still need to finalize our taxes, our CPA has been MIA for a week and it’s our last day. I better get that done.
I’d turn those four boiled eggs into a small batch of deviled eggs. (We’ll see if I have time.) We’d still need to figure out lunch and dinner. I ordered a Monday delivery of Indian vegetarian side dishes and they tend to deliver earlier in the day so we could have that for lunch or dinner along with some salmon and rice. Maybe I’d prep some tofu to add to Indian, or cut up that paneer that was hiding in back of the fridge. I need a new recipe for cooking small frozen scallops. The last batch was not to my satisfaction.
I’d check in with JB’s tutor to confirm they’re still on for lessons this week, and get a start on crafting some envelopes for the magnets I ordered to send to family and friends.
All this would be fit in around Smol’s nap times. Who has time for a job amidst all that???
What actually happened: not that. I got some work done. I did pay our taxes and filed our return. I cooked a little bit to prep for dinner. I made it outside for a bit of a walk after JB’s lesson because they were furious that PiC and Smol were walking Sera without them.
Year 2, Day 65: I was up at 5:30 am, thinking that Smol Acrobat was up for the day, because they couldn’t soothe themselves back to sleep. I took them out for a quick feed and to play but they passed out after eating instead. Well ok then. I won’t argue with that! I dropped them back in their crib for what turned out to be a good 2 hour sleep. I put those two hours to good use, mostly: walked the dog, cut up fruit, made deviled eggs for everyone else for breakfast. I had a bit of breakfast for myself while I powered through some really complex work problems. Sadly, before I could put all of them to bed, I heard a CRASH come from the kitchen. JB had dropped my precious Pyrex and it shattered. *cries* My Pyrex! My time and energy cleaning all of that up! *cries* I was nearly wrecked by the time I swept and vacuumed.
The next two hours were spent with Smol Acrobat since they, of course, woke up right when I finished clearing up that mess and PiC had two hours of meetings. My arms were jelly by the time Smol’s nap time came back around and I’d gotten them squared away. Naturally, the moment that JB finished class, they showed up in my office demanding their baby. Whoops. The baby, they are napping. Sorry! (Again, furious. Notice a pattern?)
Then it was time to plow through a pile of work and bills to pay. So many bills to pay! I don’t know how they all came to be clustered at the end of the month.
Our utility bill has been steadily rising the past three months and I’m baffled as to why but this has to stop. That mystery has to wait though, today turned into TAX RESEARCH day. UGH. I had to dig through 11 years of returns and forms to figure out my problem with my missing 8606 forms. I went down that rabbithole because we both missed filing the 8606 this year. š¤¦š»āāļø Ugh. It needed to be done, but I’m a little worried my accountant is going to hate me. This has been the year of discovering years of mistakes. Hopefully they won’t hate me too much… some were mostly their errors originally that I’m catching. I just wish I’d caught them before.
Smol’s sleep training results are all over the map. We had increasingly large blocks of sleep and then a reversion back to multiple wakings a night. We get great naps for a day or two and then a reversion to fighting and fussing. It gives me a pit in my stomach, listening to the crying some days, even though most days I’m ok with the process. I need to compile our notes for the sleep consultant to figure out what to tweak to get to full night sleep. With no time in the day to even finish a full day of work, adding data collation sounds like a barrel of laughs. Gotta be done.
Year 2, Day 66: The day really got away from us. We managed to get through last night with just one feeding but Smol was up again at 6 am. Ghastly.
We were playing on the floor just before naptime. Sera came in to see what the chirp-shrieking was about. Smol, laying on the floor, stopped and stared at her. She looked at them, then at me, then wandered off. My throat closed up with grief anew. Seamus would have come and laid down nearby, offering his side or his tail for the baby’s inspection. He would have let the baby wiggle and lurch their way over to him and grab his tail like a lollipop. Once I’d put the baby into the crib for a nap and they started hollering, he would have stayed in the room until they fell asleep. During sleep training, he never once let the baby cry it out alone. He’d lay nearby, we’d leave and shut the door behind us. He’d prod the door to be let out only after the snoring started. He was always there. And now he’s gone. And I miss him so so so much.
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I unearthed some lamb and beef curry from the freezer for lunch, still good five months later.
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My work day was completely derailed with a series of (work) problems. I finally just gave up on getting my usual work done and shut down to go deal with dinner. Everyone was out of sorts for various reasons. PiC’s stressed by the lack of time. He can’t get his work done, or his exercise in, or a million other things. I’m frustrated by the mountains of work and my lack of patience with JB this morning. I oversaw their reading assessment for school and was a complete jerk about their inability to follow directions. I was doing my best to guide them only on navigating the platform and not commenting on their answers at all but I had to walk away to compose myself when they went back to check their answers and changed them to the wrong ones. It was right, why are you doing that?? I forced myself by sheer force of will not to affect their answers. I physically put my hand over my mouth to stop myself at times. JB was frustrated that they keep biting their cheek when eating. It’s happened twice at every meal for the past three days and they are furious. Smol didn’t want their micro nap at the end of the day and they were furious about the whole business. Sera was pretty happy though.
Year 2, Day 67: I’m still trying to knock out the more complex problems at work one at a time and it feels hopeless. The sheer volume is overwhelming right now, and nothing is helped by the constant interruptions and lack of dedicated work time. PiC and I continue to trade off work time blocks so that helps a little.
I’m struggling with feelings today. Mostly the failure related feelings: guilt, sadness, frustration.
I’m on a mission to get Smol to settle down at night better which means a combination of getting them to eat well and sleep during the day and timing the naps so that they aren’t awake for 3+ hours before bedtime. It’s a tricky dance. We spend short 10-20 minute blocks out in the ultra windy yard with JB and Sera to give Smol plenty of fresh air and natural light in between each nap.
Observing JB’s Spanish lessons has been frustrating. They don’t seem to be absorbing anything, and I can’t tell if it’s because they truly don’t remember anything or if the teacher’s soft approach lets them off the hook. It makes me bananas when they’re asked “do you remember this phrase” and without taking even half a beat, they immediately say “no”. But the tutor doesn’t press them to try, they just move the lesson along, and I’m not sure that’s always the right approach. I feel this frustration when we verbally review math and money concepts and they just wildly guess answers, mentally flailing like they don’t have any foundation to start from even though we’ve been talking about money and the value of coins for years. It feels like I’m banging my head on a wall: I’ve got a headache, I’m annoyed and absolutely nothing changes. I’m trying to prioritize – teaching them how to be a good human is probably more important than specific skills but it’s hard to let go of the desire to educate them in everything useful. We started revisiting a daily earnings chart but we’ve absolutely sucked at recording earnings and demerits regularly there too so that feels like a bust. Another bust among too many.
My dear friend’s spouse is dying and I’ve offered support in all the ways I am currently able to. They are not very responsive, understandably, but I thought that was their desired level of engagement. I just got some feedback from a mutual close friend that it’s not good enough and that sucks. There simply aren’t enough minutes in any day to rest, eat, drink, work, parent, and support and I hate that I’m coming up short.
Year 2, Day 68: I’m embarrassed to admit that for the past four years I thought our dryer was a little bit broken because at a certain point, the heat would turn off but the drum would keep rotating periodically. There’s a little rectangle on the screen, and the load isn’t always dry, so I was convinced that was an error. But it worked otherwise so I shrugged it off as a low priority problem. I just did some Googling and discovered that it’s not an error state, it’s the wrinkle prevention setting! ALL THE FACEPALMS.
It doesn’t explain why the load is still damp at times, though.
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Left to their own devices, JB likes to decide we’re having sandwiches for lunch. That’s fine if they’re making them. If they were always in charge of lunch, we’d eat an endless cycle of tuna salad and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We have really got to teach them to make something else.
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Yay I nabbed a sale on Poshmark! I don’t use the app often but I’m glad it still works on occasion.
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I really need to get my eyes checked again. I’m noticing some eye strain when working.
Year 2, Day 57: I’m thinking about how people are here for a minute, in the grand scheme of the universe, and how I hope to matter in the lives of the people who know me but that in the end, my life will be over and forgotten in a blink. Just .. a thought.
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We’ve scheduled a free initial call with a sleep consultant for this week.
We’re also battling a reverse cycling situation where Smol Acrobat is waking to eat twice a night. We’re trying to shift those calories into the daytime and it’s been tough because they have no interest in eating during the day. On another angle, PiC wanted to replace the hand me down nipples that we were using. They finally came in stock and it turns out that might be one of the reasons Smol has been disinterested in eating. We picked up medium flow and they were much more interested, though we struggled with the nipples collapsing. We’re still figuring this out.
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I want to be helpful to JB when they say something doesn’t feel good but I really don’t know what to do with “My tongue feels funny.”
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We live, work, school, and play at home. We have no commutes right now. Yet we still can’t get done with dinner, bath, and bedtime by 730 pm every night. Why?? Related: Why am I not in bed by 8 every night? That would be the dream.
An hour later I realize the answer to this question tonight is: because we have no childcare and they chose to play in the backyard for an hour in afternoon while I worked on the patio outside. Oh right. Any changes to our routine means the schedule slips by an hour or so very quickly. (more…)
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.